Personalized news recommendation aims to assist users in finding news articles that align with their interests, which plays a pivotal role in mitigating users' information overload problem. Although many recent works have been studied for better user and news representations, the following challenges have been rarely studied: (C1) How to precisely comprehend a range of intents coupled within a news article? and (C2) How to differentiate news articles with varying post-read preferences in users' click history? To tackle both challenges together, in this paper, we propose a novel personalized news recommendation framework (CIDER) that employs (1) category-guided intent disentanglement for (C1) and (2) consistency-based news representation for (C2). Furthermore, we incorporate a category prediction into the training process of CIDER as an auxiliary task, which provides supplementary supervisory signals to enhance intent disentanglement. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets reveal that (1) CIDER provides consistent performance improvements over seven state-of-the-art news recommendation methods and (2) the proposed strategies significantly improve the model accuracy of CIDER.
The proliferation of biased news narratives across various media platforms has become a prominent challenge, influencing public opinion on critical topics like politics, health, and climate change. This paper introduces the "Navigating News Narratives: A Media Bias Analysis Dataset", a comprehensive dataset to address the urgent need for tools to detect and analyze media bias. This dataset encompasses a broad spectrum of biases, making it a unique and valuable asset in the field of media studies and artificial intelligence. The dataset is available at //figshare.com/articles/dataset/news-media-bias_data_json/24422122
Many approaches for optimizing decision making systems rely on gradient based methods requiring informative feedback from the environment. However, in the case where such feedback is sparse or uninformative, such approaches may result in poor performance. Derivative-free approaches such as Bayesian Optimization mitigate the dependency on the quality of gradient feedback, but are known to scale poorly in the high-dimension setting of complex decision making systems. This problem is exacerbated if the system requires interactions between several actors cooperating to accomplish a shared goal. To address the dimensionality challenge, we propose a compact multi-layered architecture modeling the dynamics of actor interactions through the concept of role. Additionally, we introduce Hessian-aware Bayesian Optimization to efficiently optimize the multi-layered architecture parameterized by a large number of parameters. Experimental results demonstrate that our method (HA-GP-UCB) works effectively on several benchmarks under resource constraints and malformed feedback settings.
Counterspeech can be an effective method for battling hateful content on social media. Automated counterspeech generation can aid in this process. Generated counterspeech, however, can be viable only when grounded in the context of topic, audience and sensitivity as these factors influence both the efficacy and appropriateness. In this work, we propose a novel framework based on theories of discourse to study the inferential links that connect counter speeches to the hateful comment. Within this framework, we propose: i) a taxonomy of counterspeech derived from discourse frameworks, and ii) discourse-informed prompting strategies for generating contextually-grounded counterspeech. To construct and validate this framework, we present a process for collecting an in-the-wild dataset of counterspeech from Reddit. Using this process, we manually annotate a dataset of 3.9k Reddit comment pairs for the presence of hatespeech and counterspeech. The positive pairs are annotated for 10 classes in our proposed taxonomy. We annotate these pairs with paraphrased counterparts to remove offensiveness and first-person references. We show that by using our dataset and framework, large language models can generate contextually-grounded counterspeech informed by theories of discourse. According to our human evaluation, our approaches can act as a safeguard against critical failures of discourse-agnostic models.
Text-guided image editing is widely needed in daily life, ranging from personal use to professional applications such as Photoshop. However, existing methods are either zero-shot or trained on an automatically synthesized dataset, which contains a high volume of noise. Thus, they still require lots of manual tuning to produce desirable outcomes in practice. To address this issue, we introduce MagicBrush (//osu-nlp-group.github.io/MagicBrush/), the first large-scale, manually annotated dataset for instruction-guided real image editing that covers diverse scenarios: single-turn, multi-turn, mask-provided, and mask-free editing. MagicBrush comprises over 10K manually annotated triplets (source image, instruction, target image), which supports trainining large-scale text-guided image editing models. We fine-tune InstructPix2Pix on MagicBrush and show that the new model can produce much better images according to human evaluation. We further conduct extensive experiments to evaluate current image editing baselines from multiple dimensions including quantitative, qualitative, and human evaluations. The results reveal the challenging nature of our dataset and the gap between current baselines and real-world editing needs.
As robots become more widely available outside industrial settings, the need for reliable object grasping and manipulation is increasing. In such environments, robots must be able to grasp and manipulate novel objects in various situations. This paper presents GraspCaps, a novel architecture based on Capsule Networks for generating per-point 6D grasp configurations for familiar objects. GraspCaps extracts a rich feature vector of the objects present in the point cloud input, which is then used to generate per-point grasp vectors. This approach allows the network to learn specific grasping strategies for each object category. In addition to GraspCaps, the paper also presents a method for generating a large object-grasping dataset using simulated annealing. The obtained dataset is then used to train the GraspCaps network. Through extensive experiments, we evaluate the performance of the proposed approach, particularly in terms of the success rate of grasping familiar objects in challenging real and simulated scenarios. The experimental results showed that the overall object-grasping performance of the proposed approach is significantly better than the selected baseline. This superior performance highlights the effectiveness of the GraspCaps in achieving successful object grasping across various scenarios.
Interactive intelligent computing applications are increasingly prevalent, creating a need for AI/ML platforms optimized to reduce per-event latency while maintaining high throughput and efficient resource management. Yet many intelligent applications run on AI/ML platforms that optimize for high throughput even at the cost of high tail-latency. Cascade is a new AI/ML hosting platform intended to untangle this puzzle. Innovations include a legacy-friendly storage layer that moves data with minimal copying and a "fast path" that collocates data and computation to maximize responsiveness. Our evaluation shows that Cascade reduces latency by orders of magnitude with no loss of throughput.
Diffusion models (DMs) have shown great potential for high-quality image synthesis. However, when it comes to producing images with complex scenes, how to properly describe both image global structures and object details remains a challenging task. In this paper, we present Frido, a Feature Pyramid Diffusion model performing a multi-scale coarse-to-fine denoising process for image synthesis. Our model decomposes an input image into scale-dependent vector quantized features, followed by a coarse-to-fine gating for producing image output. During the above multi-scale representation learning stage, additional input conditions like text, scene graph, or image layout can be further exploited. Thus, Frido can be also applied for conditional or cross-modality image synthesis. We conduct extensive experiments over various unconditioned and conditional image generation tasks, ranging from text-to-image synthesis, layout-to-image, scene-graph-to-image, to label-to-image. More specifically, we achieved state-of-the-art FID scores on five benchmarks, namely layout-to-image on COCO and OpenImages, scene-graph-to-image on COCO and Visual Genome, and label-to-image on COCO. Code is available at //github.com/davidhalladay/Frido.
Entity linking (EL) for the rapidly growing short text (e.g. search queries and news titles) is critical to industrial applications. Most existing approaches relying on adequate context for long text EL are not effective for the concise and sparse short text. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called Multi-turn Multiple-choice Machine reading comprehension (M3}) to solve the short text EL from a new perspective: a query is generated for each ambiguous mention exploiting its surrounding context, and an option selection module is employed to identify the golden entity from candidates using the query. In this way, M3 framework sufficiently interacts limited context with candidate entities during the encoding process, as well as implicitly considers the dissimilarities inside the candidate bunch in the selection stage. In addition, we design a two-stage verifier incorporated into M3 to address the commonly existed unlinkable problem in short text. To further consider the topical coherence and interdependence among referred entities, M3 leverages a multi-turn fashion to deal with mentions in a sequence manner by retrospecting historical cues. Evaluation shows that our M3 framework achieves the state-of-the-art performance on five Chinese and English datasets for the real-world short text EL.
This paper proposes a recommender system to alleviate the cold-start problem that can estimate user preferences based on only a small number of items. To identify a user's preference in the cold state, existing recommender systems, such as Netflix, initially provide items to a user; we call those items evidence candidates. Recommendations are then made based on the items selected by the user. Previous recommendation studies have two limitations: (1) the users who consumed a few items have poor recommendations and (2) inadequate evidence candidates are used to identify user preferences. We propose a meta-learning-based recommender system called MeLU to overcome these two limitations. From meta-learning, which can rapidly adopt new task with a few examples, MeLU can estimate new user's preferences with a few consumed items. In addition, we provide an evidence candidate selection strategy that determines distinguishing items for customized preference estimation. We validate MeLU with two benchmark datasets, and the proposed model reduces at least 5.92% mean absolute error than two comparative models on the datasets. We also conduct a user study experiment to verify the evidence selection strategy.
Online news recommender systems aim to address the information explosion of news and make personalized recommendation for users. In general, news language is highly condensed, full of knowledge entities and common sense. However, existing methods are unaware of such external knowledge and cannot fully discover latent knowledge-level connections among news. The recommended results for a user are consequently limited to simple patterns and cannot be extended reasonably. Moreover, news recommendation also faces the challenges of high time-sensitivity of news and dynamic diversity of users' interests. To solve the above problems, in this paper, we propose a deep knowledge-aware network (DKN) that incorporates knowledge graph representation into news recommendation. DKN is a content-based deep recommendation framework for click-through rate prediction. The key component of DKN is a multi-channel and word-entity-aligned knowledge-aware convolutional neural network (KCNN) that fuses semantic-level and knowledge-level representations of news. KCNN treats words and entities as multiple channels, and explicitly keeps their alignment relationship during convolution. In addition, to address users' diverse interests, we also design an attention module in DKN to dynamically aggregate a user's history with respect to current candidate news. Through extensive experiments on a real online news platform, we demonstrate that DKN achieves substantial gains over state-of-the-art deep recommendation models. We also validate the efficacy of the usage of knowledge in DKN.